of fury and tyranny directed against us and determined to stamp out the
spark of liberty we had kindled. No such thing! England was violently
divided in sentiment about us. Two parties, almost as opposed as our
North and South have been--only it was not sectional in England--held
very different views about liberty and the rights of Englishmen. The
King's party, George the Third and his upholders, were fighting to saddle
autocracy upon England; the other party, that of Pitt and Burke, were
resisting this, and their sentiments and political beliefs led them to
sympathize with our revolt against George III. "I rejoice," writes Horace
Walpole, Dec. 5, 1777, to the Countess of Upper Ossory, "that the
Americans are to be free, as they had a right to be, and as I am sure
they have shown they deserve to be.... I own there are very able
Englishmen left, but they happen to be on t'other side of the Atlantic."
It was through Whig influence that General Howe did not follow up his
victories over us, because they didn't wish us to be conquered, they
wished us to be able to vindicate the rights to which they held all
Englishmen were entitled. These men considered us the champions of that
British liberty which George III was attempting to crush. They disputed
the rightfulness of the Stamp Act. When we refused to submit to the Stamp
Tax in 1766, it was then that Pitt exclaimed in Parliament: "I rejoice
that America has resisted.... If ever this nation should have a tyrant
for a King, six millions of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of
liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit instruments
to make slaves of the rest." But they were not willing. When the hour
struck and the war came, so many Englishmen were on our side that they
would not enlist against us, refused to fight us, and George III had to
go to Germany and obtain Hessians to help him out. His war against us was
lost at home, on English soil, through English disapproval of his course,
almost as much as it was lost here through the indomitable Washington and
the help of France. That is the actual state of the case, there is the